Gawker Fires Back at Quentin Tarantino: We Didn’t Leak Your Script

Gawker rejected Quentin Tarantino‘s claims that it leaked a copy of his latest script, “The Hateful Eight,” in a post by editor-in-chief John Cook. Cook wrote the piece after Tarantino’s lawyer Marty Singer filed suit against Gawker Media, whose site Defamer posted a link to a site where one could download the script last week.

The suit accuses Gawker of transmitting a copy of the script that infringes upon Tarantino’s copyright, or, at the very least, or encouraging a copy of the script to be posted.

“This claim is false,” Cook wrote. “No one at Gawker saw or had access to Tarantino’s script before AnonFiles posted it. No one at Gawker transmitted it — or anything else, at all — to AnonFiles. No one at Gawker encouraged anyone to do so. No one at Gawker has any earthly idea how AnonFiles obtained a copy.”

Cook lays out a pretty thorough defense of his site’s actions, noting it was Tarantino himself who turned the script leak into a story. Scripts leak all the time, but this only became a national story when Tarantino turned to Deadline Hollywood to voice his hurt feelings.

“Thanks to Tarantino’s shrewd publicity strategy, the leak of ‘The Hateful Eight’ — and the content of the script– had been widely dissected online and was a topic of heated conversation among Defamer readers,” Cook wrote. “News of the fact that it existed on the internet advanced a story that Tarantino himself had launched, and our publication of the link was a routine and unremarkable component of our job: making people aware of news and information about which they are curious.”